A federal judge has issued an injunction on LimeWire for copyright infringement and unfair competition. The music industry had claimed the infringement against the Lime Group which owns LimeWire back in May. LimeWire has issued an official statement on their blog today with more details. The biggest change is that they have to disable the following functionality as well as distribution of the client immediately.

LimeWire has also stated that they will try to work with the music industry to allow them to stay open for business:

“While this is not our ideal path, we hope to work with the music industry in moving forward,” said a Lime Wire spokesperson in a statement. “We look forward to embracing necessary changes and collaborating with the entire music industry in the future.”

You can still readily grab the **unlocked** version of LimeWire from sites such as NZBMatrix and (I assume) various torrent sites. If you’re afraid of illegally distributing copyrighted material — which you **have** to do when you download torrents — you should check out AstraWeb (usenet premium server) along with GrabIt and NZBMatrix.

Usenet is far faster, has about as much as the major torrent sites, and you NEVER EVER have to upload (e.g. distribute) ANYTHING. All for about $14/mo with Astraweb (but there are hundreds of other providers).

I use Gnutella (what Limewire connects to) and eMule for all the really rare stuff.

Seriously- $50? wtf is wrong with you. You do your customers a disservice if you are charging anything less than $150. You should be encouraging them to move to GNU/Linux. Your time is worth more than that.

Feijfeife

Limewire isn’t gone. Not really. Frostwire which is based off Limewire and almost identical will still be around. It is open source and is being actively maintained and developed under a similar code base that split a while back… it is now a separate project.

Gswksyqdxcrl

Oh my. Developing software in the US must be a nightmare.

Barraslayer

Funny how the googlead at the bottom of limewires death article is one for “bearshare”…

CyberJoe

This court injunction against Limewire assumes so much, like we would all have gone out and bought the Stones’ “Satisfaction” (somehow) had we not been able to to download it! The record industry really thinks a lot of itself and the marketability of its old releases to believe that every song ever downloaded was a sale lost! I echo another post on here: will the recording industry now realize a massive, sudden windfall of hundreds of millions of dollars in lost revenues now that Limewire is no more…now that users cannot download 40-year-old tracks by musicians who made their money from now far-outdated music several decades ago? (Some who are no longer alive even!) Have The Beatles been substantially hurt by Limewire and other such P2P products? The Stones? etc. The fact is, not everything new and cutting edge is available via Limewire; most often, only dated, long off-the-charts tunes are available. Example: if you want to key-in “Roy Orbison” (RIP, Roy) you’ll get back hundred of his ’60s hit “Pretty Woman” but that’s about it! It’s doubtful you’ll find THE definitive collection of all of his work via Limewire. It’s the same for all artists. The software is not the goose laying some golden egg that was just released yesterday, but rather offers mostly music that has “long surpassed its market viability.” Additionally, just who has been hurt, or put another way, who will benefit from this court ruling? I read about the record companies’ long, class-action legal campaign to shut down Limewire but I haven’t read a word from the artists themselves! Are they not rich enough by now? Were you to download Springstein’s “Born to Run,” didn’t that track already make its millions some 30 years ago? No, this is a “lawyers’ game” for the most part. We might as will keep paying “tribute” to Henry Ford’s distant heirs for old Henry having mass-produced automobiles at the turn of the century, just because we’re still driving automobiles today! If any money is recouped via this Limewire injunction you can bet that it’s not going to go to those poor, impoverished artists like Sir Paul McCartney or Sir Mick Jagger, but rather to record company moguls and their legal proxies who seek to rape the company for every cent they can. Meanwhile, the artists who actually made the music won’t get a thing, and in a very ironic sense, they will be the ones to be ripped off in the end as there is no way the court could redistribute the monies gained from a Limewire law suit (in any equitable way) to each and every artist whose music was ever downloaded via Limewire. It would be impossible to know just what songs were downloaded so that the artists themselves could share in the legal bounty! In the end, the money will just end up lining the pockets of the worse bottom-feeders in the pond: the corporate lawyers retained by the recording companies, that’s all!